30
THE NEW YORKER, JULY 21, 2014
were rooting for an unlikely outcome---
for California Chrome to pull o a feat
that hadn't been achieved since 1978---
and the sigh was a necessary conces-
sion to reality, and to its tendency to be
unremarkable.
Whether the motor-sports fans were
rooting for success was a more open
question, one that, in light of the safety
risk, pervades the X Games. "You guys
having fun?" a sideline reporter asked, try-
ing to rev up the crowd before the start of
Stadium Super Trucks. "We gonna see
some carnage?"
"I, potentially, am promising some ca-
lamity at Turn One, just like rallycross,"
the announcer said. "They're going to go
hard, and---boom! Just preparing you for
some red flags."
The dirt on the track was slick and
relatively free of gravel, and the rally-
cross tournament had featured a few too
many collisions and spinouts, causing
long delays. There were no major inju-
ries, fortunately, but, on the other hand,
the professional stunt driver Tanner
Foust flamed out early, and I heard the
winning strategy employed by Scott
Speed, a Nascar alumnus, described
as "patient." Borrrring. Silver went to
Bucky Lasek, the "hurt, not old---maybe
a little old" skateboarder, who took up
driving just a couple of years ago, follow-
ing the X Games mantra "With age, get
in the cage."
On the paddock, I'd spent much of my
time in the garage of the eventual bronze
medallist, Nelson Piquet, Jr., a Brazilian
who used to compete in Formula One,
and there I noticed, on a table, a sticker
with the words "Certified Gnarly." The
evident lack of progression in the ac-
tion-sports argot had surprised me---
these were words, like "extreme," that
seemed overused even in 1995---but I
began to understand that I was mistaken.
The progression was horizontal, in the
spirit of Ron Semiao's original insight
at Barnes & Noble. Piquet's girlfriend,
Brooke Basinger, rolled her eyes when
I called her attention to it. " 'Certified
gnarly' is kind of like their saying or their
team name now," she said, referring to SH
Racing, Piquet's outfit. "Coming out of
even my mouth, or his mouth, I don't
know. It took me a minute. And his P.R.
from Brazil, when he says it, he has an
accent, so it's even funnier. But yeah:
gnarly. 'Gnarly, dude!' "
Freestyle motocross, on the other
hand, should be credited for truly in-
ventive and evocative language when it
comes to naming tricks. While watching
the riders warm up, I heard the announc-
ers refer to a dead sailor, a California roll,
electric doom, a candy bar, a look-back
helicopter, a kiss of death, and a one-
handed Hart attack.To be fair, the warm-
ups were prolonged, because of a strong
cross-breeze that threatened to make pro-
ceeding with the event too dangerous, so
they had a lot of airtime to fill. These
stunts were, in some cases, purely hypo-
thetical. "The big tricks are coming," one
commentator said.
"We know they exist," another said.
The rider Wes Agee landed awk-
wardly and appeared to dislocate his
shoulder. "A little Bruce Willis 'Die
Hard' moment there---just knock it back
in the socket!" the first commentator
said. (Actually, Mel Gibson in "Lethal
Weapon.") Then, exhibiting some Janu-
sian thinking, he added, "X Games
2014: safety is our No. 1 priority."
On Sunday afternoon, I stepped in-
side the gaming tent, which had
air-conditioning but no windows---a
giant arcade, with the blue light and the
eerie whirr of too much circuitry. Katie
Goldberg, a representative of Major
League Gaming, the organization that
was supervising the event, greeted me,
and asked if I'd seen the X Games mobile
app. Demonstrating on her iPhone, she
showed me a feature ranking the most
popular X Games personalities, as voted
by the app's users. Of the top twenty,
nineteen were gamers. The other was
Tony Hawk---and he was twentieth. "It
just shows how engaged this audience is,
how digitally savvy they are, how stoked
they are to be at X Games," Goldberg
said, referring to the so-called "e-sports
community." Stoked, really? "Yeah, to-
tally!" she said. "There's a lot of similar
lingo, and there's also a lot of lingo they
use that maybe you wouldn't under-
stand." She also added, unprompted,
"They have girlfriends."
The semifinals were under way. Alu-
minum bleachers with seating for two
hundred had been set up in the back of
the tent. They faced two soundproofed
booths, side by side. Four young men---a
team's worth---sat in each booth, wearing
headsets and facing monitors. Camera-
men occasionally patrolled the fronts of
the booths, zooming in on the players' fa-
cial reactions, presumably for the benefit
of viewers at home. A pair of larger mon-
itors faced out toward the live audience,
showing the action inside the game itself:
characters with machine guns navigating
a war zone. On a stage up above the
booths, two men sat behind a desk, with
microphones, providing live commentary.
("So far, they're doing a phenomenal job
of rotating around this map, keeping
OpTic o their flags.") The team on the
left, Evil Geniuses, was the favorite, the
tournament's No. 1 seed. It was sponsored
by Monster. OpTic Gaming, on the right,
seemed to have the support of the crowd.
One of its players had Red Bull decals on
his earpieces. As someone who's never
played "Call of Duty," I had a hard time
distinguishing good guys from bad guys,
but the audience exhibited no ambiguity
when it came to cheering for carnage.
Goldberg introduced me to Mike
Sepso, one of Major League Gaming's
co-founders, who was dressed in Vans,
checkered shorts, and a purple T-shirt.
"If this was twenty years ago, we would
have tried to build M.L.G. into a big
professional league and then done a TV
deal with somebody," he said. "The real-
ity is that's not the model anymore. Not
only do we have this, you know, weird ac-
tivity that we're trying to turn into a
sport but we're on the tip of the spear in
terms of the transition from traditional
media to digital media."
What Sepso meant was that he
needed ESPN not for its viewers but for
the mainstream credibility. Major League
Gaming was founded in 2002, and culti-
vated a relationship with the sports net-
work almost from the start. Sundance Di-
Giovanni, another co-founder, landed a
gig as the weekly gaming correspondent
on "Cold Pizza," a morning show on
ESPN2. But a failed experiment with
broadcasting tournaments on the USA
network made them realize that their tar-
get audience didn't really watch television.
They were the so-called "cord cutters"
who threatened ESPN's power over the
cable industry. As we spoke, a hundred
and fifty thousand people were streaming
the action live, via phones and Xboxes, on
MLG.tv. In the past four years, the
M.L.G. audience has grown by nearly
sixteen hundred per cent.
"Initially, there was a little bit of, like,